It's the 41st rendition of the popular cultural festival at downtown's Filipino Center Plaza, sponsored by the Associated Filipino Organizations of San Joaquin County. The fiesta continues today from 11 a.m. through 8 p.m. on the corner of Market and Center streets.

On Saturday, amid the exotic aromas of adobo, pancit and dinguan and a relaxed crowd enjoying finger foods such as Lumpia Shanghai and chicken on a stick, attendees were enjoying the open mic karaoke before the organized entertainment kicked in.

Skipping bigger Filipino festivals this weekend in San Francisco and his home base of San Diego, T-shirt vendor Wil Cruz brought his Island Blue booth to Stockton for the fourth year.

"We love coming here. This is a really good festival for us," said Cruz, 47.

"The people like our designs. They connect really well with them. A lot of people say they're better than they can find in the Philippines," he said.

Cruz specializes in parody T-shirts of familiar logos with a Filipino bent. For instance, his popular "Gago" shirt uses the internationally recognized font and colorful letters of the "Google" logo. Gago, for those in the know, translates as "dummy," according to Cruz.

He also sells a "Harry Pek Pek" shirt in the familiar "Harry Potter" style and an all-black "The Ninong" (translation: The Godfather) shirt with the well-recognized hand and strings of the puppeteer above.

Second-generation Filipino Dillon Delvo of Stockton was staffing the Little Manila booth, providing a history lesson on the unique waves of immigration to the United States from the Philippines and the starring role played by Stockton.

Delvo, recently named executive director of the Little Manila Heritage and Cultural Center that has been providing after-school programs in Stockton schools for the past five years, said his organization is on the cusp of a greater presence in the community.

"We've been invisible for so long, and we're trying to change that for our youth. We're trying to tell that story," Delvo said, explaining that many people are unaware that Filipinos make up the largest ethnic Asian minority in California. In Stockton alone, they represent 9 percent of the population, or about 27,000 residents.

The Little Manila center is preparing to move into its first headquarters in downtown Stockton in the very near future, Delvo added.

Today, the booth will host third-generation Stocktonian and Edison High graduate Dawn Mabalon, an associate professor of history at San Francisco State University and the author of "Little Manila is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipino/a American Community in Stockton, California."

Mabalon will be signing copies of her 462-page illustrated volume, the first book ever written on the topic. It traces the mostly forgotten stories of the once-thriving Little Manila District downtown, home to the largest Filipino community in the country for most of the 20th century.

Today's events start a little earlier, with a procession at 9:30 a.m., followed by an outdoor Thanksgiving Mass at 10.